Marriage imagined as a route to freedom

Marriage imagined as a route to freedom is Devorah’s evolving hope that an arranged match might provide an exit from the restrictions of her family and community. The idea gives romance and possibility to a system in which other people shape her prospects; as experience accumulates, however, marriage proves neither an assured escape nor a substitute for self-determination.

Family Strategy and the Promise of a New Life

The idea has a family history before it becomes Devorah’s own romantic expectation. When her father remained unmarried at twenty-four, Bubby and Zeidy looked overseas for a bride who might accept the offer of a more comfortable life in America. They prepared a seven-room apartment in their brownstone and were willing to pay the wedding and travel expenses. Devorah’s mother, the daughter of an impoverished divorcée and living on a benefactor’s charity while attending a Jewish girls’ seminary in London, accepted the chance to leave for a new country. In this earlier match, marriage was plainly connected to migration, economic provision, and family plans. Yet her parents’ marriage began to fall apart soon after Devorah was born, and her mother left; Devorah was raised by her grandparents. The family precedent thus contains both the promise of a life elsewhere and the possibility that a marriage does not secure the future its arrangement appears to offer.

As Devorah approaches seventeen, the prospect of her own match gathers around her. Zeidy’s priorities are piety, Satmar family background, and reputation: a good match reflects well on the family. Bubby, by contrast, wants a boy who will speak respectfully to her, not one so religious that he refuses to talk to his own grandmother because she is a woman. Devorah’s private wishes are different. She wants someone who will let her read books, write stories, and take the subway to Union Square to listen to street musicians. Mindy imagines that Devorah might marry someone more modern, perhaps someone who secretly listens to secular music, watches movies, and goes bowling. The match is therefore not simply a choice between marriage and singleness. It becomes the point where family status, religious observance, and Devorah’s hopes for a wider life meet.

Courtship as a Possible Passage Out

Devorah’s new status as a working girl gives her more time without supervision, but she understands this freedom as precarious trust rather than independence. Her successful final school year and prestigious job improve her marriage prospects; the increased attention from her grandparents and relatives makes her feel that a consequential change is nearing, even though she is not told the details of the family discussions. She chooses to endure the suspense rather than seek information, reasoning that knowledge would intensify her anxiety without changing what her family decides. At the same time, she can read more freely, buy books with her own wages, and revisit Little Women with a sharper sense of Jo’s struggle to fit the expectations imposed on women. The book suggests to her both the cost of being reshaped by society and the possibility of finding a place within it. She wonders whether marriage might similarly calm her temperament and make her a proper young woman, without entirely erasing who she is.

The material preparations make the promise tangible. Chaya gives Devorah new clothes and accessories, including a black handbag, Italian leather shoes, pearl studs, and a necklace bearing her Hebrew name. Devorah knows that this sudden lavishness is connected to making her presentable for marriage, and she suspects the gifts may also be meant to sweeten her toward the arrangement. She feels the thrill of finally receiving attention, even as she recognizes how easily that attention might distract her from the terms of the bargain. The things offer pleasure, but they also show how marriage changes her value in the eyes of the family: she is newly equipped for display and presented as a promising bride.

Meeting Eli gives the escape fantasy a more intimate form. Hearing that his father had restricted what he saw on a trip to Europe, Devorah sympathizes with him and imagines that she and Eli might return together to see the world. Marriage suddenly looks like a possible plane ticket to freedom. She also hopes he will be brave and strong, and that the two of them will do things they have been told not to do. This is an imagined alliance: not merely a husband who permits her interests, but a companion who might share her resistance to the boundaries surrounding them.

Engagement and the Limits of Choice

The engagement makes the family’s investment in the match visible. After the party, Devorah will not see Eli more than once or twice before the wedding, and Zeidy does not approve of the couple speaking on the phone. She tries to preserve Eli’s face in memory, but the image fades within two weeks. Their engagement contract, signed at a public celebration, is binding: the rabbis regard divorce as preferable to breaking it. The arrangement offers Devorah a future while sharply limiting her ability to reconsider it.

The celebration combines commitment with display. Zeidy breaks a rose-trimmed china plate as a symbol of the engagement, while Bubby gathers its pieces. Devorah receives a diamond ring and has selected a two-thousand-dollar Baume & Mercier watch for Eli, paid for with a blank check from Zeidy. Her own ring is plain and its band too thick, but Eli looks handsome wearing the watch she chose. She takes pride in him partly as an attractive future husband to display, a revealing contrast to her more inward hopes of travel and shared rebellion. At the same time, the watch she gives him feels personal because she selected it for his taste; later, an expensive watch given to her by her mother-in-law has no inscription and seems intended for an imagined bride rather than for Devorah herself. Gifts can express attention, but they can also make plain whose preferences the marriage is designed to serve.

The apartment prepared for the couple extends the sense of a new beginning. It is only six hundred square feet, on the fifth floor of a building on Wallabout Street, but it is separate from the house on Penn Street. Devorah brings books there and hides them in the bathroom cabinet; alone on the bare floor, she reads The Romance Reader, about a religious Jewish girl who hopes that marriage will bring independence and who later divorces her husband, only to return to her family’s table. Devorah reads the novel as painfully close to her own possible future. Its sequence unsettles the simple equation of marriage with freedom: if marriage disappoints and divorce returns a woman to the world she tried to leave, neither step guarantees an exit. Still, she insists to herself that Eli will be different and imagines that they will leave the surrounding constraints behind together.

Motherhood, Disillusionment, and Self-Ownership

After marriage, the hope of escape becomes harder to separate from the life Devorah actually inhabits. Her reflection on the enormous, uninscribed watch she receives makes the distinction especially sharp: it seems meant for a bride her mother-in-law expects, not for Devorah as an individual. She anticipates that she will eventually part with such gifts and feel lighter as each link to her past comes away. The marriage’s material promises have not disappeared, but their meaning has changed. What once appeared to be care and opportunity can also register as an attempt to fit her into someone else’s design.

Motherhood makes the stakes larger than Devorah’s own wishes. As Yitzy approaches the age when he will receive payos and begin cheder, she imagines him entering a narrow religious education while she is pushed toward the background of his life. She can no longer treat her own future as the only question: the possibility of leaving must also account for the kind of childhood and education he will have. Yet readers of her anonymous blog warn that a woman who leaves the community may not be allowed to keep her child. They point to rabbinical courts and to other women’s failed attempts, making the cost of escape concrete. Devorah has no settled plan, but she comes to believe that she and Yitzy should have a freer life, including a real school and books he need not conceal.

The concept reaches its decisive reversal in Devorah’s later understanding of freedom. She describes years of hiding her opinions and performing piety, then insists on the right to acknowledge herself and present her true face to the world. A car accident becomes, in her interpretation, a clean break between her former life and the person she now understands herself to be. The following day she signs a contract to write a memoir, treating the book as a final remembrance of an identity she has left behind. When she and Eli later see a religious marriage counselor, she already knows she will not return. Marriage had once seemed the passage through which freedom might arrive; by the end, Devorah locates the possibility of freedom in her own decision to leave, to write, and to imagine a different future for herself and Yitzy.